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On 14 Dec 2006, at 12:22, George M. Sheldrick wrote:
With apologies to Kevin, but I can't resist commenting that there is
another way to produce software that a few obstinate old dodderers
like me still use. You put all the code into a single Fortran source
file being careful not to introduce any dependencies whatsoever. Then
you take any Fortran-90 or 95 compiler and compile it, e.g.
gfortran shelxd.f -o shelxd
which would make an executable called shelxd. I usually put this in a
directory that is already in the PATH (e.g. /usr/bin or ~/bin under
unix). No environment variables, makefiles, scripts or other such
complications are ever required. Optionally you could add a few
compiler-specific switches such as -O5 or -static.
This is almost foolproof and works for almost any operating system,
and will probably still work for many decades to come.
If we did this for coot (i.e. put the source of the coot and its
dependences in one file), that file would be approximately 1,300,000
lines (excluding comments) (And incidently, according to sloccount,
would have cost $50 million to develop). [These numbers should be
taken with a pinch of salt, of course, because not every function of
the dependencies are used, but then again, the dollar has been devalued
considerably in the last few of years and I think its fairly clear that
you get more value/productivity in scripting languages than pure C (I
was going to add "and fortran", but that might be fighting talk!)].
Paul.
--
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~emsley
Structural Biology Laboratory, University of York, York, YO10 5YW, UK
